This is a collection of articles dealing with organic gardening, ecology, environmental restoration, news items of interest, travel and just about anything else I find of interest and willing to share with others around the globe. - ENJOY!

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Dire predictions of impending doom are the popular online items today, not only in Media, but also the entertainment industry. World catastrohpe is sensationalized because it has a high curiosity factor which boosts ratings which translates into advertising dollars. But it's not just the Media and Hollywood, scientists also are getting into the act. Mythical tales of asteroids past and comets of doom setting off chain reactions of destruction at some future time. Okay, let me provide a more modern update on that text in the title of my post. Seriously folks, this can be fun, even if you are not necessarily biblically inclined. Here is Matthew 24:39 with a modern day application where I've adjusted a few terms and expanded on some descriptions.

39 "And the people didn’t realize what was going to happen until the floodClimate Change came and swept them all away."

What has always fascinated me about the present climate change debate, it seems that the biggest deniers of this anthropoligical phenomena tend to be many of those claiming to be of the Christendom worldview. But the question is why ? Especially in view of their own holy book's warning that environmental ruin would be a major part of the sign of living in the 'Last Days' ? Take this statement in Revelation:

18 "The nations were angry with you, but now it is your turn to be angry with them. . . . . both the great and small—and to destroy those who have caused destruction."

Okay, that sounds serious enough to me, But, why all the discontent and 'Apathy' when it comes to lack of concern over climate change and environmental issues in general on the part of those who claim to promote the wonders of Nature created by their God ? The preceding verse of Matthew at 38 gives a historical clue on the human attitude back then in the quote below:

38 "In those days before the flood, the people were enjoying banquets and parties and weddings right up to the time Noah entered his Ark,"

It seemed that the population in general mentioned back in Genesis was so caught up in the average daily affairs of life, that they paid little or no attention to their surrounding physical and social environment until that catastrophic weather event warned by the Ark's builder Noah occurred. Now let me update that text to a more modern times application with a few alterations here and there to shed light on what is clearly hapening today:

38 "In those days before the flood climate changed, the people were enjoying banquets and parties [includes partying, revelries, sporting events, weekend recreation, etc], and weddings [social networking, dating sites, consumerism, planning families, pursuing careers as opposed to being family oriented, etc, etc, etc] right up till the time of irreversible climate change."

39 "And the people didn’t realize what was going to happen until the floodClimate Change came and swept them all away."

There, how is that for spotlighting the apathetic attitude of times past and our present day modern times ? I know I probably won't make many friends from either side [atheist/religious], but that is exactly the reality of the present day world we live in now. Much of the discussion by the world's leadership about Climate Change is mostly giving lip service or token feedback in public because that is what the Media and EcoActivists usually expect. Actually following through on those promises and making drastic changes in policy on the other hand is a different matter. People need to understand that any self-respecting politician who is career oriented knows that his/her job teaters on a delicate balance of keeping the people who elected them materialistically satisfied. Ask the majority of citizens to cut back on their pursuit of consumerism and material comforts for the sake of Nature is a sure nail in the coffin towards any hopes of further political career advancement. Fail to satisfy any citizen's basic necessities materialistic desires & ambitions and you may as well kiss your career goodbye and retire. But almost no one seems to blame or hold accountable any leader who at the very least just says they care about Nature or claim they support finding Eco-Green Solutions. Although not really having any track record of actually committing themselves to any real viable ecosolution for reversing the damage done, they still get the public's support if at least they say they care about the environment. Take a look below at what is most important to the majority of global leaders.

Image - The Gulf Today

Ever heard of these global economic schemes like the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP), Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ??? Well, if these are anything like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), then it's all about economic power and zero consideration on the environment. Seriously, I remember back in the 1990s at the one year aniversery since NAFTA was implemented, there were news articles high lighting how prior to NAFTA there were a couple of Billionaires in Mexico, but since NAFTA a year later, there were now 14 Billionaires. But for a change, let's forget all about the Politicians, Clergymen, Scientists and Business leaders and I'll provide a series of Nature Memes [for the reading deficit folks] which will highlight where the natural world is presently on the failure scale caused by human apathy. Of course there are all those megafires going on globally, rising temps, pollution on land, etc, etc, etc, but let's focus mainly on Oceans. Just oceans, you know, those climate and weather mechanism drivers ? Decades ago almost everyone thought that oceans were too monstrous to be effected by human mismanagement. But oh how times have changed. For some years now there have been several articles on about areas around the globe where sea creatures are washing up in different locations, but that was dismissed. Then recently, the same thing has happened but the scale is far grander.

One of the most outrageous things I read recently was about more fish die offs in Vietnam which were blamed on the pollution from an industrial company called Formosa Plastics and I believe a steel manufacturer. An official from this company made an outrageously stupid statement, but then was later forced to apologize, then fired to provide corporate public relations damage control excuse.

"Much of protesters' anger in the past week has focused on a Formosa Plastics official, since dismissed, who said people in Vietnam had to choose between industry or its fishing industry, adding: "You can't have both."

The company did it self no favors when one of its senior officials told reporters: “Sometimes in order to win something, you have to lose something. It’s impossible to build a steel plant here and keep fish stocks in the surrounding area high at the same time.”

Truthfully, as sick as such an irresponsible admission by an industrial entity is, this is exactly the same identical attitude with all other corporate and big government entities around globe as well. But for public relations purposes the others are smart enough never make the same stupid mistake and announce such a career ending belief to the rest of mankind publicly. It's all about national economies with token half-hearted eco-solutions thrown in for eye-candy appeal to smoke-screen the reality behind the scenes.

The ultimate cause of the total and complete lifeform die off throughout the world's oceans is mankind's mismanagement of land resources. Since the first world war, science and technology have taken the lead in fascilitating everyone on the planet in polluting the world' s waterways which eventually make their way to the Sea. Look at the map below where most of the algal blooms are occurring. Is it not this world's most successful industrial nations ? These red tides as they are called are a result of nutrient enriched buildup caused by pollution entering the coastal environments. Such algal blooms in aquatic marine environments cause a depletion of oxygen in the waters and this eventually leads to a domino effect.

And if the algal blooms appearing everywhere isn't bad enough, they are clearly beciming more and more vicious to the existence of the marine life where they make their more and more frequent appearancea. Take the latest examples from Chile. It's an incredible nightmare as every type of living marine creature is dying off by the 10s of 1000s.

"Algal bloom ‘of biblical proportions’ has led to protests and health emergency as concerns raised over dumping of rotting salmon in ocean"

Huffington Post: "Nature Collapsing, Fossil Fuels Culprit"

The photo to the right here is an earwax core extracted from a beached blue whale in 2007, Santa Barbara, Calif. I know, it sounds gross, but what they determined it was contaminated with goes a long way in explaining perhaps why whale and dolphin deaths are beachings and collisions with marine vessels are on the rise. Below here is an excerpt from the article in Huffington Post:

"In 2007, a 12 year old blue whale was struck and killed by a ship off Santa Barbara, Calif. A 10-inch, giant plug of its earwax revealed 16 pollutants including flame retardant, methylmercury and several persistent organic pollutants including high levels of DDT and PCBs. The whale’s biography divulged an eastern Pacific Ocean rife with man-made toxicity."

A Short Note on a typical Climate Change denier argument that doesn't make logical sense considering the opposition's religious worldview background.

I've often stumbled across GW deniers in the comments section like "Watts Up With That?" [Anthony Watt's site] & others, where religious folks who believe the Universe and Earth are only 6,000+ years old. But they will provide links and charts claiming climate has been changing back and forth for millions of years. Take this comment by a religious person, Sherry E. Cano, on Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper - English Facebook Page under a climate change article:

"Think about it...if the earth is 4 billion yrs. Old...I'm pretty sure the earth has been hot and cold sense the beginning RIGHT! This world hasn't been industrialized long enough too cause 1 tiny bit of our changing climate. Animals die or adapt to the changes just as we humans do. "

Need I Say More ?

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Headline May 15th, 2016

Fortune Magazine: Is Mankind Reaching the End?

Investor Jeremy Grantham told participants at Fortune's Brainstorm E conference that mankind is now in the “race of our lives” to survive the next century.

“We’ve been around for 300,000 years. We’ve had agriculture for 12,000 years,” the 77-year-old money manager said on Monday in Carlsbad, Calif. “Yet we’ve come down to just 100 years where the whole game is playing out.” He said it’s not just that the climate is warming, but that climate warming is accelerating.

Grantham says he is far more optimistic about technology’s ability to solve energy problems than most environmentalists. But he is also far more pessimistic about the ability to feed a rapidly growing global population, given changing climate patterns, than most technologists. “Both groups underestimate the good news or the bad news.” As a result, he said, “it’s going to be quite a horse race."

The guy above the well known elder environmental statesman, James Gustave Speth, who authored the acclaimed books Red Sky at Morning (2003) and The Bridge at the Edge of the World (2008), who has apparently grown ever more convinced that the world's politics and economies are so corrupted, and the environmental movement so inadequate, that mankind can no longer hope to address the climate crisis, or their deep social ills, by working strictly within the system. While such an admission is admirable, his solutions are unfortunately swabbing the deck of the Titanic to clean it up before it finally goes down. In other words putting trust in the same old failed system. Still, the meme is terrific.

But getting back to many of the folks who are climate change deniers, many of whom claim to be of a conservative religious persuasion. If you do believe in the ancient climate change account in your own holy book, the bible, do you realize that what killed those people was not the deluge mechanisms like volcanoes, record rainfall events, asteroids or comets hitting the Earth. No, it was their apathetic attitude as was even pointed out by your very own holy man, Jesus Christ. Let's recap what was wrong with that ancient world and fast forward to modern times. The comparison is being made to the general lack of caring attitude of ancient humans of past times which proved to be their undoing and the present modern day prevailing apathy which infects the majority of mankind today.

Luke 17:26-28 (Modern English Version)

27 "They were eating, drinking, marrying, and were given in marriage"

28 "Likewise as it was in the days of Lot: They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built."

All those things listed above are certainly not wrong pursuits in themselves, but the average person on earth is so caught up in the everyday anxieties of daily living and this obsession with consumerism for a better life, that they are totally oblivious to the disintegrating life support systems around them until we go beyond a point of no return. The fact is no one should need any scientist, politician or even clergyman to tell you something is radically wrong with all natural systems around us. And the present movement towards a type of Scientific Socialism , which is a combination of "Philosophy-Economics-Politics" isn't the answer either. As both Jeremy Grantham and Gus Speth said, you can't place a materialistic answer towards correcting human affairs on Earth. It's a spiritual one which most secularists and their conventionally religious counterparts (especially Christendom) fail to grasp. One hundred plus years of supposed enlightenment since 1914 and humans haven't learned anything.

Back to the Future III - 'Point of No Return'

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For those with a further hungering for growing examples, here are some more links below

"Am I completely nuts or apocalyptic animal mass kills are increasing dramatically around the world?"

And so read the title of an interesting site which has compiles a rather large long list of unusual lifeform dieoffs since the first of this year.